Taghesh turned toward Talen, crouching low, his left hand already reaching to grapple with Talen's right.
Taghesh's right arm, the child-arm… the abominable light swirled and coalesced there until it almost suggested the crude shape of a fully grown, adult limb flickering just beyond direct perception.
Magick? Poison-tainted hallucination?
It didn't matter. The phantom hand gripped his wrist with pressure real enough for pain.
The sensation was terrifying as it was welcome, for it meant his limbs were waking up.
They grappled. Talen was decades younger than Taghesh, but the magicker was full of furious passion, and Talen was exhausted and drugged. It took all of his strength and faltering will to keep Taghesh from flinging him against the hard-edged rim of the pit.
"Too bad you dropped the sword!"
Was Taghesh actually mocking him? "You shot me!"
The magicker's snarling expression slipped into confusion for a blink, and then a wicked, satisfied smirk stretched across his face and he redoubled his efforts to wrestle Talen off his feet.
The magicker had not spoken.
Talen was dumbfounded.
Who, then?
"Our blood is wasted in your veins," the voice chided.
Again, Taghesh's lips did not part, and again, he gave no indication that he'd heard a word.
Neither, Talen realized, had he.
The words rang in the tortured, increasingly befuddled space between his ears and behind his eyes.
"We should rip out your pages of the book, rather than let you sully them with this embarrassment!"
Talen had to be drugged.
He had to be.
Taghesh tried to slip a foot behind Talen's ankle. Talen struggled free and just barely kept his balance.
The disembodied abuse went on.
"I can't believe you dropped my sword!"
"M-mothersfather..?"
Rajen
Rajen's initial rushing assault served to allow Talen to face an unassisted Taghesh, but she failed to get Ulthus' blood on her blade.
He backstepped beyond the range of her knife, laughed, and lashed out with his sadistic Science.
All over her body, Rajen felt fiery, thorny vines push through her flesh and burst from her skin.
Pain locked her muscles. She trembled in place, but it wasn't the first time a magn sought to make her helpless to their intention. Now, as then, fury drew air back into her lungs. She released her burning breath in three words.
"You will not!"
Her teeth became as nails jammed into her splintering cheeks and jaw.
None of these atrocities were real.
None were any less agonizing for it.
Her tongue seemed a swollen tangle of spikes. No more words for her.
If those last were her coda, they would do.
Ulthus stared at her with euphoric, gleeful lust. The front of his robe thrust forward; the foul, autonomous response of his flesh.
Though Rajen was sure his arousal was entirely reserved for her suffering, seeing physical confirmation of how her helplessness inspired Ulthus likewise enhanced her own indignation.
With her rage bloomed pain in kind. It seemed as though her newly molten, boiling brain swelled to push through the growing gaps between the grinding bones of her skull. Her breath was acid sluicing past rictused lips.
She realized she was on her knees. Despair threatened to supplant wrath.
Ulthus drew near. "I want to feel your death," he panted, hoarse and low, "with more than my mind."
Though it hurt so, so much to move the gravelly, hot stones that were her eyes, she would rather that than see Ulthus' grinning face.
Through the nauseating glow of the Outsider's incursion (Talen Talen you must get the child Talen Talen Talen), Rajen saw Hatul move to dispatch one of the acolytes, only to slip on a blood-slicked paving stone and go down.
Before the magicker could brain Hatul with a heavily pebbled club, Kug came out of the fog of light. Rajen's ears were now deaf to anything save the thundering staccato stampede of her own heart, but she saw the magicker scream when Kug drove his ax under and through their ribcage.
Kug pulled Hatul to his feet. The magn's expression flowed from gratitude to a tortured blend of terrible sorrow and resignation. Tears reflected on Hatul's anguished face.
Ulthus had his hands around Rajen's neck.
Hatul clasped Kug's shoulder. Barely discernible, as if reality struggled to assert itself, wispy threads of probability twined around the two as they turned to assist Fagahg in confronting another hapless, terminally dedicated acolyte.
Even though she was drowning in pain and his strangling grip was just more water in the sea, Rajen knew Ulthus was certainly choking her to death. He could turn her brain to bleeding mash with his magick, but he'd opted for a more tactile conclusion to their conflict.
He'd made a decision.
Though it seemed to devastate him… Hatul had made a decision.
Blackness crept at the edges of her vision. Not long now. If she could only grasp this nagging thing, through the fear she now distantly acknowledged, through the consuming pain…
Here, in this place where probability and possibility were pushed aside by the invading presence of the unknowable Outsider… where the probability streams were faint, ineffectual phantoms…
Even here, all made choices.
In this place where the streams barely existed, Rajen didn’t follow them. No one could.
She rode them.
And if anyone ever appeared to hold the reins at any time, that was evidence of yet another stream winding out of chaos, like a vine growing up and around the branch of a tree.
This was truth.
Everyone made their own reality.
The realization smoothed away all the crumbling crevasses where terror had found purchase. As fear fell away, so, too, at last, did its blind spawn, anger.
Ulthus' excruciating power persisted, but Rajen found she could think around it. Past it.
She was not pain. Pain was a choice, regardless of whether it was she who made it for herself, or it was made for her.
She finally looked at Ulthus.
Most of her life, more than anything else, having her choices made for her was something Rajen never could abide.
It seemed like years since she'd remembered the knife in her hand. Pain had locked the joints of her fingers around the hilt.
Instigating motion made her feel as though the muscles of her arms and shoulder and chest were flayed by poison fire.
It didn't stop her from shoving the blade into Ulthus' gut.
His hands jerked away from her throat.
His eyes bulged.
Rajen withdrew the knife.
As if it was eager to race back to its master, pain fled from her.
Ulthus clutched at the hole in his middle.
Still kneeling, Rajen grasped the knife in both hands and stabbed him again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
Chapter Thirty
Talen
Boxed in by the bilious, writhing light, Talen's world constricted to include only the clawing fingernails and pounding fist of the fiercely squirming, frenzied Taghesh, the hard, bruising paving stones of the pit against his shoulder blades, and, just out of reach now, the squawling, crimson-faced Ranith.
Not to ignore the disturbingly astonishing disembodied voice of his vituperative, and long-dead, mothersfather.
"I carried that sword across the Western Reach! Split bellies and severed limbs in the name of the Alwarden the length of the Wildendyn Wall! Your father kept it safe all those years… perfect! And you! You drop it when you need it most! When the world needs it most! On stone! On stone!"
Sensation had returned to Talen's limbs in time to keep Taghesh's magickly enhanced phantom arm from throttling him, but not before the mad magicker landed several
blows on his chest and face. The Plain One's armor helped protect his body, but Talen had lost his helmet as they grappled. His left eye was swelling shut, and his mouth filled with blood.
Troupewarden Ragan had taught him, the hard way, what to do when your hands are restrained in close combat. Talen slammed his forehead into the bridge of Taghesh’s nose.
Taghesh grunted, dazed, and automatically freed his left, ordinary hand to clutch at his face as blood flowed from his nostrils.
Despite being mostly certain the voice in his head was only the result of the poison dart, Talen couldn't hold back a defense against his immaterial abuser.
"I was drugged!"
Mothersfather Kranlen, or his addled imagination—it didn't matter—was more than ready with a retort.
"You've been drugged your whole wasted life! Running around with those feckless slitpouches when you didn't have the sense to die with my daughter. Skulking around this city, barely a roof above your bed, wasting years pining for a magn who leads you by your skinsack when she bothers to remember you're alive… you think you have the sense or the will to honor my name? Better you lay back and let this frothing, skinny old magn end your farce of a life!"
The tirade slammed Talen all at once, a battering as injurious to his mind and will as the pummeling delivered by the magicker's phantom arm, but taking no more time than a thought from his own head.
Talen's vision swam. The blood he'd swallowed threatened to flood back up his throat.
Time stuttered.
Taghesh had not even finished wiping his bloody face.
Ranith's wailing moved in heavy waves, somehow felt across the back of Talen's neck, sound given thrumming presence, until his head throbbed in time and his ears rang.
Was this all the poison? Was it the awful, cloying light, seeping into his mind and mismatching his senses and whatever was left of the real?
Throughout, his mothersfather's horrible, mocking laughter was somehow the least unreal thing, and to Talen, no less unwelcome.
"You have no worth!” Kranlen howled. “You have no worth!"
Talen's anguish began as a strained moan his clutching throat finally released in a word.
"Silent!"
He had to be certain of something. Anything.
Talen wrapped the fingers of his free hand around Taghesh's neck. He felt life pulsing below papery skin, and it was so very reassuring.
Taghesh gasped to claim a breath.
Then, even as his face began to color, he smiled terribly.
The magicker's over-muscled phantom arm of coalesced light abruptly relaxed.
Across a muddy, extended heartbeat, Talen overcompensated against the sudden lack of resistance, and Taghesh reversed his own effort.
A feint!
Time lurched to catch up with itself. In that dizzying rush, Talen took a punch to the jaw that, had he not released his hold on Taghesh and allowed himself to roll away, might have broken his neck.
All the same, he banged his head against the rim of the pit. Blinking white stars spread like cast sand across the black shroud threatening to smother his consciousness.
Kranlen's ongoing tirade served to keep him from oblivion.
"No worth! No worth! Worthless! No worth!"
"Shut up!"
Blinking past bloody tears, Talen rolled onto his back to see Taghesh coming for him out of the writhing, glowing fog, magickly massive fist raised high.
His mothersfather's laugh rang, shrill and grating, in Talen's skull. "He's gonna bash your head in with a trick! A trick!"
"Shut up!"
Taghesh leaped, wailing triumph, the glowing phantom fist trailing sickly plumes of undefinable color in the fouled air behind him like prismatic blood polluting a vomitous stream.
"No worth!"
Was it his mothersfather? Or Taghesh? Or Talen's own final admission?
The infant cried on.
Somewhere in the center of that mind-aching glow of diseased feathery light, a child faced terror and death.
Talen knew terror and death very well.
What did worthiness have to do with anything?
There was only living, or dying.
Croaking something between a groan and a sob, Talen's hand found the edge of the pit and, so anchored, pulled himself violently from Taghesh's path.
Taghesh landed hard. The phantom fist shook the floor and cracked tiles where it landed, then fluttered like sculpted candlelight and winked out, leaving Taghesh to grasp at dust and fragments of stone with tiny, delicate fingers.
Kranlen snickered across the inside of his skull. "You have nothing left. You know it."
Talen was a mass of pain, and so tired. He was almost ready to agree.
He saw a flicker of fear cross Taghesh's face.
The old magicker struggled to crawl on his belly, back into the light, toward the center of the pit, where Ranith wailed.
Talen was filled with fire.
"No!"
He intended to throw himself on the other magn. He discovered he only had the strength to claw his way up Taghesh's feebly kicking legs and crawl up his back.
The magn was soft beneath his robes. Frail.
Taghesh whispered in a voice like thorn soup, "You will die here. You cannot stop it." He twisted beneath Talen until they lay with a finger's breadth between their faces, intimately close in their hate. "Amang-huru… slips in…"
He was just a magn.
An old, weak magn.
Talen took his skull in both hands and bashed it into the tilestones.
The look of stunned astonishment on Taghesh's face was very satisfying.
So Talen did it again, and kept going until his hands were too slick with brains and blood to hold on to anything.
Talen rolled off the empty corpse, panting. His hands were sticky and hot. Wet things slipped from his hair.
The room grew darker.
Did he suffer from some wound he was too injured to discern from a dozen lesser ones? Was it killing him?
Grateful relief that he might soon rest came over him like slipping into a warm bath.
It scared him.
"Wait…"
He looked around, seeking out Rajen. There she was. There…
"Wait…"
The room wasn't getting darker. Not exactly.
Rather, the terrible, cloying light was… contracting.
Coalescing.
Though Talen would not have thought it possible, the angry, roiling, Tah-bright flare at the center of the pit grew stronger. More intense, and… thicker, somehow.
Ranith's cries were quieter.
Not weaker. More distant.
It made no sense. There was nowhere to go.
Unless the pit was deeper than he had thought, and Ranith was being drawn down.
Mothersfather Kranlen returned. "You're done, Talen." The formerly mocking sneer in the hollow voice was now an almost conciliatory tone. "Hey. Get my sword, right? Don't forget it."
The sword didn't matter. It never had.
Talen crawled down the slope of the bowl, toward the pit. He could not look at the pulsing glow that snapped there; his eyes would not abide it. Blind, he followed the rapidly fading sound of Ranith's anguished crying.
"Talen."
The voice in his head, be it his mothersfather somehow drawn by the powerful Science at work in this place, or some panic-inspired madness all his own, had never called him by his name until now. It was bittersweet.
"Talen."
More insistent this time.
"Shhh," Talen said. "The child."
The light burned past his closed eyelids. The world was white fire, though absent of heat. Only light, which he now had to push through, like walking into a curtain of candle grease, or bog sand.
"You'll listen to me!" Kranlen barked. "Stop! You can't keep going. You have to stop!"
The voice grew higher, shrill. Frightened? Where had the grizzled, taunting soldier gone?
"Don't! D
on't!"
Talen was sure his eyes were still closed, but there, right there on the ground in the middle of the shallow pit, just as all along, there was Ranith. He could feel him.
The light was almost too thick to move through. Just a little farther…
His mothersfather howled. "You can't! No!"
The voice was toothless after all. It couldn't possibly really be Kranlen. Kranlen was a hero.
Still… whatever it was, Talen was certain he could not have come this far without it.
"Thank you," he said.
A rending, then, like hide peeled back from flesh, all around him, thrumming across his own battered, bloody skin…
He was through.
There was no more awful light, or any other, and yet, this was not darkness.
He was not sure where his body ended and the floor, the air, the room began.
Where was the room?
Where was anything?
Talen had a sense… an intuition… that he was somewhere, but somewhere kept changing, flowing, bending, bleeding, twisting around itself, a braid and a loop and a bubbling mass of All… now unfolding with a snap in every direction, if he still had a self, a him, a here through which he might gauge direction.
Why was he where?
What was he how, and when did he then?
Was his pain gone? Or had he forgotten what pain meant?
Was he breathing?
And then…
A new star, but not of stomach-churning sickness and wrong.
A warmth.
A weight.
Ranith.
Talen thought of what it was like to smile, though he no longer understood how to form one without first discovering if he had a face, or really comprehending what that meant.
He only knew the child was safe.
He had done it.
But.
Oh.
Wait.
Something is going away.
Something so very brittle, like a leaf left to dry in the road. Rare, singular, and fragile.
He saw that road and those trees. The wagons ahead and behind.
Troupewarden Ragan's gravel-scratched laughter. Songs and conversation. The troupe.
His beloved, troubled, doomed second family.
Where was Rajen? He would have liked to see her, too.
Light of the Outsider Page 20